A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music by Robert S. Hatten

Author:Robert S. Hatten
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253038012
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

6Virtual Subjectivity and Aesthetically Warranted Emotions

How do listeners actually engage with virtual agency and subjectivity? In other words, how do they access and interact with those emotions that are staged by the composer as intensified agential expressions? The possibilities are endless. Consider the following account, which valorizes a listener’s capacity to go far beyond what is presumed to be expressed by the work:

The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvelous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives, and symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I study, Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say. Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to Tannhäuser, I seem indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from the caverned hill. But at other times it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of the passions that man has not known, and so has sought for. (Wilde [1891] 1968, 1399–1400; my emphasis)

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